Doing Data Stuff With Other Humans

Month: May 2017

We are excited to release Beta 5 of Vysda packed with many new features. It took us longer than we planned but considering the amount of improvements and new features, it was definitely worth to take the extra time.

One of the most important features in Beta 5 is ability to embed visualizations. You will now see an Embed icon below each post. An embed code will appear upon pressing the icon.

Simply copy and paste the code into your web page. The result will look something like the following. Note that embedded posts come with title, source name, and buttons to see the underlying data and data source details.

We’ve added several new visualizations in Beta 5. First one is density map. This is an important visualization to present large amounts of spatial data. Following is a density map of tornadoes by year in the US. Instead of displaying thousands of circles on map, this visualizations turns that data into a density map. It is also known as heat map. But since we already have a visualization type called heatmap, we prefer calling this density map. Red areas mean higher density of tornadoes while blue indicates lower density.

Other new visualizations we added in this beta are combo chart, two-sided bar, slope graph, and seat diagram. Following is a good example of a two-sided bar displaying a data by age and gender.

One of the comments we’ve been hearing is the lack control on visualization colors. We added color palette support in Beta 5 to give our users ability to select colors and customize their pallets for consistency. You can chose from existing color themes or create your own. We’ve also added an option to apply the new color theme to all visualizations in the current project.

Ability to manipulate data is an important part of Vysda. We developed a data wrangler tool in the previous beta. We’ve added additional capabilities like an expression builder where you can add a new data field by combining existing data fields. For example, if you have a date/time field called Date, you can simply create a new field by typing an expression YEAR(“Date”) to capture year information.

We’ve also added ability to merge data from other tables. Let’s say you upload a data set of sales data by countries. But you’d like to normalize sales figures by population. You can simply search for country level population data and join it to your data. Now that you have a new field population field in your data, you can create a new column by dividing sales by population using our expression builder.

These are only some of the features we’ve implemented in Beta 5. Visit our support pages to learn more about our new features. Let us know what you think about Beta 5. We’ve already started working on Beta 6. We have lots of new features coming up. Stay tuned!